customer service

Imagine this: you're a student looking for some specific edition of a no doubt ridiculously overpriced textbook, and you think you found what you need on Amazon. You order it, relieved that you don't have to go to your school's bookstore and provide your firstborn as payment. Only when you get the book, it's the wrong edition. You contact Amazon to track down the right edition, and after a few days they tell you they don't have it and to return the book for a full refund.

That's exactly what happened to Pedro in Ireland. Frustrated with his experience, Pedro left a negative review in a customer satisfaction survey, only to later find an enormous schlong, "The Hulk 10.25-inch Huge Dong Black," in his shopping cart ready to offend any delicate sensibilities: "I was at the office, in an open space, with people behind me. A guy and two girls were sitting by me when I opened up Amazon and they saw the contents of my shopping basket." Well, maybe your coworkers should learn not to look at other peoples' monitors, Pedro.

Pedro contacted customer support, and though they wouldn't confirm an Amazon representative had placed the item in his cart, they issued him a €100 credit and an apology, saying they would work with HR to make sure this didn't happen again.

Pedro stands by his actions, believing that any bad customer service should be reported, and that "the entry for "The Hulk" is completely misleading. I would expect something called "The Hulk" to be green. It's picture is pink and the description says it is black. My whole issue with Amazon.de started because of incorrect description of items -- and this entry does not help their case."

A man in Spokane, Washington was surprised to find out that Comcast had changed his name from Ricardo Brown to “a**hole” Brown on his most recent bill.

He and his wife Lisa had been trying to cancel their cable subscription with the company, which should have been a very simple process.

But it was not.

They first reported the issue to consumer advocate Christopher Elliott, who wrote:

Instead of complying immediately, a representative escalated her call to a retention specialist, who tried to persuade her to keep the cable service and sign a new two-year contract.

His wife said she was not being rude, but the Comcast customer service agent decided to get back at them for not taking the offer in the most passive aggressive and childish way possible.

Elliot spoke with a Comcast rep who eventually apologized.

“We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” he said. “We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”

The company also promised to fire the employee responsible and has offered to both waive the $60 cable cancellation fee (how generous) and provide a refund of their two years of cable service.

The sad thing is that this is already 10 minutes into the conversation according to the caller:

This recording picks up roughly 10 minutes into the call, whereby my wife and I have already played along and given a myriad of reasons and explanations as to why we are canceling (which is why I simply stopped answering the rep's repeated question -- it was clear the only sufficient answer was "Okay, please don't disconnect our service after all.").

Comcast has since apologized and said they were "very embarrassed" by the situation.